ABSTRACT
This expression and the related terms ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘developing country’ appear within the framework of the new world ‘order’ and the international organizations set up following the Second World War. They were supplemented by a term which had much currency in left wing circles, and was destined to have a great future, the concept of the Third World. Formulated by A.Sauvy on the model of a French juridical expression which has its roots in the French revolutionary period, the ‘Third Estate’, which rose up against church and aristocracy, the term suggests that an international ‘class division’ of societies exists within the new world order. The opposition ‘development/ underdevelopment’ or ‘developed countries/developing countries’ suggests a linear evolutionist process. The notion of the Third World, by introducing the implicit hypothesis that the dialectic of class struggle has spread over the entire planet, both revives and modernizes Marx’s historicist vision.
